Goodbye, Scroogled?

Scroogled, the attack ad campaign Microsoft launched to initially attack Google for switching its shopping results to a paid model and grew to include critiques about Google “reading” the emails of its users to serve ads, is on its last legs.

Well, at least part of it.

Don’t expect to see any more ads on TV or in newspapers, according to Bing Search Director Stefan Weitz, who told KQED the campaign is “about finished”. We have confirmed this with Microsoft. A Microsoft spokesperson gave Search Engine Watch the following statement:

“The Scroogled campaign has sparked a dialogue that shows how much consumers care about their privacy, and how strongly they feel about the fact that Google goes through their personal emails to sell ads. More than 3.5 million people visited Scroogled.com, and over 114k signed a petition asking Google to stop going through their Gmail. While the ad portion of this phase of the consumer education campaign has finished its scheduled run, this important conversation about privacy continues, and so does this important consumer choice.”

Microsoft launched its Scroogled website and attack ads in November ahead of the holiday season. Though this part of the campaign is done, it’s a pretty safe bet that we haven’t seen the last attack of Google from Microsoft.

In fact, after our original post published, a different Microsoft spokesperson got in contact to tell us the Scroogled “campaign will continue” and to “stay tuned for the next chapter.” It seems as long as Microsoft thinks Google is Scroogling people, the campaign will live on.

This week, both LinkedIn and Facebook are beefing up their paid social offerings in different ways, while Google seeks to cut off Adwords revenues for fake news sites. And might Google be favouring desktop over its own AMP in its upcoming mobile-first index?

Here we’ll take a look at the basic things you need to know in regards to search engine optimisation, a discipline that everyone in your organisation should at least be aware of, if not have a decent technical understanding.